Will Doug Ford’s highway gift to developers cost him a majority government?  

In any good sleight of hand, the magic lies in what you don’t see. 

Misdirection. 

It’s the most popular trick in the magician's playbook— ‘look over there’, while I slip a card up my sleeve. 

Government policy decisions that involve billions of taxpayer dollars and potentially devastating environmental consequences are not supposed to involve misdirection. 

But it is becoming very much the norm with the PC government and two pet projects: the Bradford Bypass and Highway 413, or the GTA West Highway. 

In a pair of campaign style announcements this week, Premier Doug Ford was in Bradford and Caledon touting the supposed benefits the construction of these two highways will bring to their respective locales. Along with Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney, Ford exulted in the reduced congestion the highways would create across the western GTA and south of Lake Simcoe. The time savings, PCs claim, will allow hard working Ontarians to get home quicker and spend more valuable time with their families. The pair celebrated the reduced greenhouse gas emissions that would result from eliminating gridlock and getting idling cars on 400-series highways across the Greater Golden Horseshoe moving again. 

Ford dismissed the critics of these projects as nothing but downtown Toronto “ideologists” who know nothing about the areas where these highways are going to be built, and are simply against development and progress. 

“This is a government that fixes problems,” Ford said. “We’re going to get communities moving again.”

It’s a pledge that will be attractive to many voters, especially those who routinely experience gridlock on the province’s major highways.

It’s all a sleight of hand.

At the end of 2015, with developers who bought up much of the land along the proposed Highway 413 route aggressively pushing the plan with the support of Caledon politicians whose families stand to profit handsomely from the dramatic increase in property values, the previous Liberal government suspended the environmental assessment for the project, as concern mounted over its benefits and the damage to the environment.

An expert panel was appointed to carefully study the plan and consult with local communities that would be directly impacted.

When it handed down its findings in 2018, the evidence was clear: “[T]he Panel concluded that the GTAW Recommended Actions would deliver approximately one minute of travel time savings per vehicular trip across the Greater Golden Horseshoe. On its own, the proposed new GTAW highway corridor would deliver approximately half of those savings, or about 30 seconds per vehicle trip.”

To enhance the movement of goods the research suggested, “Adding dedicated truck lanes to Hwy 407 and reducing truck tolls would likely deliver travel time savings similar to the proposed GTAW highway for all users, and for goods movement in particular.”

The panel’s policy research also found the Highway 413 plan contradicted provincial legislation aimed at protecting farmland, the Greenbelt and smart growth planning mandated to create compact communities, which significantly curtail congestion, not highway-induced sprawl that creates even longer commute times and more gridlock. 

The comprehensive analysis which involved extensive traffic modelling based on multiple growth scenarios, concluded that: “[T]he Panel found that the GTAW EA did not demonstrate that the proposed highway corridor met the test of need and the lack of reasonable alternatives for crossing valuable and protected lands, as required by the Greenbelt Plan (2005) and PPS (2005).”

Ford and his PC colleagues do not want you to know any of this. All of the above information, and the panel’s entire report was wiped from the Ontario government website shortly after Ford took office and restarted the Highway 413 plan which the Liberals cancelled when the findings were presented.

The work was supposed to inform future decision making: “[T]he Panel recommends that MTO make the GTAW EA data available and easily accessible online, including relevant information about the data sources, collection methods and timing, to ensure that other users can tap the full potential of the data.”

But Ford, Mulroney and the rest of their PC colleagues, leading the charge for a project developers need to maximize profits from the land they already assembled, do not want you to have access to the facts and data. All of the panel report, including its careful examination of the EA data, has been wiped from the public web pages where it used to be housed. 

Premier Doug Ford in Caledon this week. 

(Government of Ontario) 
 

These highways will be filled with gridlock only a few years after they are opened — in the case of the Bradford Bypass, the MTO knows exactly when this will happen — and opposition to these developments is being very much fuelled by local residents unhappy about the destruction of their valued greenspaces and what the construction of these mega highways will mean for Ontario’s fight against climate change. 

Ford has characterized these residents as clueless, like him, to the need for balancing beneficial transportation design with the reality of a planet that simply cannot sustain itself if more and more carbon is sent into the atmosphere.

His suggestion that ‘downtown Toronto ideologists’ are driving action against the highways, flies in the face of all the local opposition mounted by residents and their elected representatives. The vast majority of council decisions on the Highway 413 plan in impacted communities have gone against Ford and the developers.

His claim of solving gridlock is false, and he has failed to show who would benefit, other than the builders salivating over the profits from new subdivisions erected next to a major 400-series highway. 

Since the 1950s, when the 400-series label came into being, more highways have been built to connect the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Highway 400 was constructed in the early 1950s to connect Toronto and Barrie. In the late 1950s, Highway 403 drew a connection to Hamilton. The 405 connected to the American Border and St. Catharines in 1963, the 406 connected St. Catharines and Welland in 1977 and most recently the tolled 412 and 418 connected Highway 401 to Highway 407. But after these lines were drawn, transportation policy turned from making more new highways to adding lanes for existing ones, a philosophy that saw the 401 become one of the world’s busiest and widest highways. Yet car commuters still sit in traffic, which gets worse and worse and farther and farther every year.  

Highway 401 is one of the busiest and, in parts, widest highways in the world, yet still suffers from terrible gridlock.

(Photo from Clashmaker via Wikimedia Commons) 

While Monday and Wednesday’s press conferences in Bradford and Caledon were billed as announcements from the Government of Ontario, they were very much campaign stops. 

Late last month, Ford and the PCs launched a trio of campaign ads, one attacking NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, one against Liberal Leader Stephen Del Duca, and another marketing the PCs as “the party saying yes”. 

“I hear it all the time, politicians are famous for finding reasons to say no, that’s not me,” Ford says in the spot. 

On Wednesday, he used these similar lines when describing the failure of past governments to get these highway projects off the ground. The previous Liberal government canned the Highway 413 project after the panel of transportation engineers, technical staff and land use researchers found it would not solve the area’s congestion problems, and the Province was far better off investing in transit solutions instead, while the Highway 413 plan directly contradicted legislation to curb harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

“[I]n 2016, Ontario passed the Climate Change Mitigation and Low-carbon Economy Act, which legislated progressively more stringent emission reduction targets for Ontario. The new legislation was followed by Ontario’s Climate Change Action Plan (2016), which laid out actions to be undertaken over the next five years to meet these goals. In the Panel’s consultation, several of the submissions received expressed concern that a new highway appeared to be out of alignment with the province’s commitment to these targets. The Panel believes that it is important to assess how each project will contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” the findings of the 2018 report concluded.

But that’s not how Ford is spinning the decision to scrap the 413 Highway. 

“This should have been addressed, many, many years ago, but previous governments chose to say no. They said no to commuters and to families, by refusing to see the necessity of highway infrastructure. They said no because they cared more about ideology than about real people,” Ford said on Wednesday in Caledon. “We can’t afford to go back to the politics of saying no, instead, we are saying yes.”

It was an echo of his statements made in Bradford not 72 hours before. 

“For decades, they said no to building the roads and highways needed to address the needs of the province's growing population, that changes now,” he said. “Today’s announcement is more proof that our government is on the right track to say yes, yes to shovels in the ground for new highways.”

Two press conferences over three days, virtually carbon copies of one another with Premier Ford using campaign rhetoric first rolled out in an ad blitz launched last month.

(Screengrabs from YouTube)

It’s clear from the language of these announcements, taken directly from PC advertisements appearing across Ontario, that Ford is using them to create a wedge for his reelection campaign next year. 

While Ontario campaign finance law prohibits spending of more than $1 million on advertising in the 6 months leading up to an election period — a rule the Ontario Superior Court struck down earlier this year for infringing on Charter rights, before Ford enacted the rarely used notwithstanding clause to overrule the court’s decision — there is nothing stopping him from using these packaged “announcements” as opportunities to push his campaign rhetoric on the taxpayer’s dime. It’s unclear how much money was spent on the pair of announcements in Caledon and Bradford, both of which required extensive staff time, as well as planning for equipment and all the trappings of an election-style event. 

The Bradford Bypass and Highway 413 are key pillars of Ford’s reelection campaign, but the promises being made about the end-result of these two highways are misleading at best, and outright falsehoods at worst. 

In both announcements, Ford said those who oppose the highway do not live in the area, and are merely “ideological activists” who oppose any and all new development. 

“Unfortunately, the people up in this area don’t have the bicycles that people downtown have where you can hop on a bike and drive from Point A to Point B, a lot quicker,” Ford said.

Around both the Bradford Bypass and the 413 Highway, it is very much the work of local, grassroots campaigns that brought these archaic transportation approaches to the wider attention of their local communities, and Ontarians in general. 

Peel residents protest outside a mayor’s breakfast hosted by Caledon Mayor Allan Thompson, an avid supporter of Highway 413, in October.

(Photo from Jenni Le Forestier/Twitter) 

In Caledon, it is very much the persistent effort of local activists like Jenni LeForestier or Dan O’Reilly or Irene Ford with Stop the 413 in Vaughan that has confronted the PCs mischaracterizations of the facts. In and around Bradford West Gwillimbury and wider Simcoe County, it is the work of local residents like Bill Foster with Forbid Roads Over Green Spaces (FROGS), or Margaret Prophet with the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition, or Claire Malcolmson with the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition that is bringing attention to the proposed destruction of sensitive greenspace and the planet’s intertwined climate.

Local politicians have been paying attention.

“The assertion that ‘downtown activists’ are running this campaign is not only categorically false but extremely patronizing. Communities outside of the GTA are the stewards of most of the Greater Golden Horseshoe's headwaters, forests, farmland and wetlands — and we are happy to do that, but every time changes have been made to reduce protection of water, wetlands, farmland and endangered species it's our communities that get chopped up and paved over,” Prophet tells The Pointer. 

“Every increase in demand for aggregate, means our watersheds are dug up and impacted. So to hear that it’s only the downtown activists that could be organized and intelligent enough to stand up like we are, shows just how little politicians understand about who lives in these communities and what they care about. It’s been local community groups, almost entirely volunteer run, in the dozens who’ve been connecting and fighting back because this isn’t about a campaign for us. It’s our job as stewards of these precious resources to stand up for these spaces. It seems erasing local efforts and diminishing local concerns is part of the spin when infrastructure projects come before the well being of people.”

That’s exactly what Ford did Wednesday. 

“Just sitting there and telling people, ‘Hop on your bicycle or get behind a horse and buggy and start driving,’ it doesn’t cut it,” Ford said, suggesting those outside Toronto are being brainwashed by ‘city slickers’. “That’s the ideology of a lot of people that are from downtown Toronto making their comments about up here in Caledon.”

Along the route of the 413, nearly every municipality, including Mississauga, the Region of Peel, Vaughan, Halton Region, Halton Hills, Orangeville and the City of Toronto have all passed motions opposing the highway’s construction as a result of the hardworking local activists pushing the issue, despite Ford’s repeated misleading remarks that the vast majority of local communities and their elected representatives want the highways built.

This simply is not born out in the level of local participation against his plan, and the council decisions by those who legislate based on the will of constituents.  

In the Bradford area, councils in the Town of Innisfil and Barrie both turned down motions asking to support the highway’s expedited construction and instead urged the government to conduct all the proper studies before breaking ground. This was before the government exempted the project from all aspects of the environmental assessment process. Local residents have since appealed to Ottawa (a second time) to have the project designated for a federal environmental impact assessment, similar to the 413 — something the Ford government conspicuously left out of its announcement in Caledon.

In all of the PC’s early campaigning, no mention has been uttered about Ottawa’s decision to interject. If the impact assessment agency finds federal legislation, including endangered species protection, would be compromised by the highway construction, the Liberals could scrap the entire plan.

When Ottawa announced earlier this year that it would indeed heed the advice of environmental groups and thousands of local residents who called for the federal intervention, the PCs initially acknowledged the possibility the 413 might not move forward, but then Mulroney dug in.

In a statement, the Minister of Transportation pushed back against the decision. Questioning the need for federal involvement, she said, “as recently as March 2020, the experts at the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada reviewed the evidence and declined to take further action on the GTA West”. 

She forwarded a letter from the IAAC, sent to the Ontario transportation ministry more than a year ago. Mulroney’s characterization of what the federal agency stated in its letter is misleading. 

The Province submitted its own set of information to the agency and was told that according to what it provided, it did not “appear” to warrant the need for an “initial description of the Project to the Agency.”

It’s clear that the IAAC did not do its own initial review, and after this has been done, with the input of outside expert stakeholder groups and thousands of local residents, the agency decided it would have to get involved. 

Mulroney’s tone signalled the PCs would not be backing away from the controversial highway project.

“At this point, it is unclear what the scope of a federal impact assessment would be, or whether a full impact assessment would be warranted,” she said. She added that her government’s assessment is “among the most stringent” processes (the PCs have failed to publicly disclose this work and requests to detail its EA approach have been ignored). “That said, we also believe in the principle of ‘one project-one assessment’ and will work with the federal government to address their newly-found concerns…”.

Regarding the Bradford Bypass, which Ottawa decided not to intervene on, the Province has assured The Pointer that a number of critical studies, including those that analyze the impacts on agriculture, air quality, groundwater, noise and vibration, waste and cultural heritage will be completed before any work begins on the bypass. 

Ford suggests it is Toronto elites pushing for due diligence and sound decision making around future transportation design and environmental impacts, disregarding the federal action and those taken by local residents along with their own elected representatives. 

Will stoking division between urban and rural voters, despite the fact climate change transcends urban and rural boundaries, impacting everyone who wants to breathe clean air and drink clean water, work for Ford?

His bet is that people outside Toronto do not care about environmental stewardship, the protection of watersheds, forest land and local species, that many of us are concerned first and foremost about our right to drive a car on a highway.

He is taking a page from the Donald Trump Republican playbook: don’t make it an election about what really matters to communities and future generations, make it a referendum on being told how to live by condescending city dwellers, those annoying people who demand the wearing of masks and vaccinations.

But many Ontarians outside Toronto, young and old, suburbanites or exurbanites, in cities and on farms, don’t want their natural world sacrificed for another long stretch of clogged asphalt.  

Residents protest the PC government’s highway plans outside the office of York Simcoe MPP and Minister of Transportation Caroline Mulroney.

(Photo from Margaret Prophet/Twitter) 

The potential time savings of these two proposed highways — “staggering numbers”, according to Ford — will be the most attractive elements for those looking to support construction.

“You should be spending more times doing the things you want, not sitting in your car for hours and hours on end,” Ford said. 

It’s a statement everyone can relate to, and one Ford hopes voters in June will cast their ballot on. However, these savings are far from certain. 

According to the PC government, drivers will save 30 minutes when travelling the full-length of the GTA West Highway, and 35 minutes when using the Bradford Bypass. 

It remains unclear where the province is getting these figures from. If the studies have been completed, they are not easily accessible on public webpages for the GTA West or Bradford Bypass. The “time savings” page for the GTA West, aside from disputing the 30-seconds calculated by the independent panel report in 2018, states its 30-minute figure is the right one, but provides no report to show where this number came from or how it was calculated.

This has been a consistent feature of the PC strategy, to make claims of having evidence to support its position, but failing to provide any documentation or work to support the claims. 

Misdirection.

For the Bradford Bypass, the Province is well aware that any time savings created after the bypass is constructed will be completely eliminated only a few short years later. Premier Ford and Mulroney, who is also MPP for York-Simcoe, where the bypass would be built, are also well aware that the construction will do nothing to alleviate congestion on Highway 400 or Highway 404 which the bypass will connect, while tearing directly through the provincially significant Holland Marsh wetland complex. 

Studies completed by the MTO show extremely limited congestion relief in the Bradford area, and next to none on the other major 400-series highways. The MTO studies also show that the bypass will be congested by 2041, not long after its completion. 

A significant consideration for York-Simcoe voters next year is the developer-driven motivation for the Bradford Bypass, just like those builders who already assembled the land along the 413 Highway corridor.

Built into the misleading remarks by the PCs is the idea that future development will create much of the increased demand for the highways.

But as the panel of transportation design experts and land use researchers found, the assumption of increased demand is based on the construction of the highways in the first place.

“There appears to be an inconsistency between the rationale of ‘unlocking’ land for development... while simultaneously assuming in travel demand forecasting that population and growth forecasts in the GTAW study area are equivalent with or without the GTAW Recommended Actions,” the 2018 report reads.

This means that it’s largely increased sprawling development created by highways, that forces the need for more cars on them. 

If, instead, smart growth is pursued, creating complete communities with proper employment nearby, a live-work model, then there is no need for massive, environmentally destructive highways that rip through sensitive ecosystems.

It’s all stated in the report, which the PCs wiped from the government website.

Next to the Town of Caledon claiming a 2.2-million square-foot warehouse in the Greenbelt will be “ecologically beneficial”, the stunning comment by Ford and Mulroney that these highways will help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is perhaps one of the most blatantly misleading claims made about environmentally devastating projects to date. 

Induced demand, a well understood phenomenon in economics and transportation analysis — as well as one observed across Southern Ontario for decades — posits the ‘if you build it, they will come’ scenario. Building more highways does not reduce traffic, but merely encourages more people to get behind the wheel. So any benefits, whether that be reduced congestion, or even a reduction in GHGs by less cars idling in place (something studies have found can result after highway expansion) are exceedingly limited as the benefits do not last very long at all. Roads fill up again, but now with more vehicles, contributing to increased GHGs. 

Not to mention the irreparable damage done to greenspace and species at risk that will be caused by both of these highways. 

In the case of the Bradford Bypass, crucial spawning habitat for fish will be destroyed as the 4-lane roadway cuts across 28 different waterways, the highway would destroy 22.1 hectares of “higher quality woodlands”, 17.2 hectares of the Holland Marsh, 9.5 hectares of provincially significant wetlands, 32.7 hectares of wildlife habitat, 190.37 hectares of “higher capacity mineral soils”; and 154.3 hectares of active agricultural production. The highway will also “severely impact” the quality and quantity of surface water and groundwater. It means about 800 football fields of valuable environmentally sensitive land will be either completely destroyed or significantly degraded by the highway. 

The previous EA — completed in 1997, nearly a quarter century ago — identified very few species at risk in the area, naming only the Louisiana Waterthrush and Red-shouldered hawk. However, the province’s own Natural Heritage Information Centre shows there are many more that now rely on the area. 

An analysis by The Pointer found 11 different species at risk in the path of the Bradford Bypass, including six threatened species, two endangered, two listed as special concern and one “restricted species”. These species are those that are either sensitive to commercial exploitation, like trophy hunting, or their habitat is so threatened, that their locations are kept secret from the general public as to avoid disturbance. There are also six different nesting colonies for a variety of water and wading birds directly in the highway’s path. This is by no means a definitive list. Expert sources have told The Pointer the number is more than likely much higher as animals move through these green space corridors, of which the Holland Marsh wetland complex is one of the most significant in the area.

A similar laundry list of degradation results from the construction of the GTA West Highway. 

A previous investigation by The Pointer confirmed 29 species either listed as endangered, threatened or of special concern have been spotted along the highway’s route in the last 6 months, 21 of them inside the areas where proposed interchanges could be built, transforming valuable habitat into a hub of automobile traffic and human activity.  

This includes 6 species listed as endangered, 7 as threatened, and 8 species of concern. In many cases, the species are named on both provincial and federal government at-risk species lists, meaning their habitat is usually protected under government legislation. 

Many of the species, The Pointer found, were spotted in the area of multiple interchanges, meaning the impact on them could be even more severe as the highway would destroy multiple habitats they rely on in one fell swoop. 

The Highway would also destroy 2,000 acres of Class 1 and 2 farmland, would drive concrete through the headwaters of four watersheds and drastically impact land held sacred by the Mississauga’s of the Credit First Nation.

“We believe that this Project will have adverse impacts on the MCFN; on our Aboriginal and Treaty Rights, as are protected by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. The Project will forever impact our rights,” Chief Stacey Laforme wrote to the federal government in March of this year. “The MCFN has serious concerns that the Project will impact our physical and cultural heritage, as it relates to ceremonial sites, burial sites, and the cultural landscape, among others.”

“There is a high potential for archaeological significance within the Project area. Given the history of our people, the Mississaugas would have walked lightly on the land, not leaving a large cultural footprint that can be quantified today. Archaeological assessments will have to be done that align with our Consultation Protocol and Archaeological Standards and Guidelines.4 All parties must be actively engaged in this work. Sharing data is not sufficient,” Laforme added. 

 A sampling of the species at risk that will be impacted by the Bradford Bypass (top) and GTA West Highway.

(Graphics from The Pointer) 

The GTA West Highway would also pave over 400 acres of the Greenbelt; land Premier Ford previously promised not to touch — that was after being caught on hidden camera prior to his 2018 election promising a room full of developers he would open the Greenbelt to them for growth. 

“What I did say is we weren’t going to touch the Greenbelt for developers,” Ford said when asked Wednesday about his previous statements, before emphasizing that this is a critical highway to relieve congestion. 

In an effort to show off his party’s green chops, Ford repeated at both announcements that his government is going to make Ontario a hub for the construction of not only electric vehicles, but the batteries that power them. It’s a much needed move to get Ontario’s foot in the door of the rapidly growing green economy, but if Ford was serious about climate change and getting more EVs on the road, he wouldn’t have scrapped the subsidy provided to Ontario buyers of these vehicles when he was first elected, a decision that caused the sale of these green vehicles to plummet. 

In 2017, when the incentive was in place, 801,431 new vehicles were registered in Ontario, roughly 39 percent of all vehicles registered across Canada and in line with the province’s population share. The same figures show Ontario accounted for 42 percent of all plug-in hybrid electric and battery electric purchases, both of which are considered zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) and qualified for the previous Ontario rebate program.

Midway through 2018, right after Ford's election, Ontario cancelled its incentive to purchase ZEVs. The actual number of green cars registered in Ontario increased from 8,180 in 2017 to 16,758 in 2018, more than double the number from the previous year’s sales, thanks to the rebate program. But in 2019, after Ford’s PC government had scrapped the rebate the year they were elected, the figure plummeted to 9,762. In 2020, the number was 10,515.  

When asked about the rebate program earlier this week and whether he would consider relaunching it, as these cars begin to become more accessible to Ontarians, Ford declined, claiming he did not support giving rebates to millionaires and the rich using the subsidy to buy $100,000 vehicles. It’s unclear what data he was referring to. 

The PC government claims it is “consulting widely” on both of the highway projects and is committed to transparent decision making. Their past actions contradict this. 

With the GTA West Highway, online “consultations” have not allowed the public ample opportunity to participate, have been cut short in some instances, with consultants appearing to cherry pick questions they deem desirable, ignoring those residents who have serious concerns about the cost, time savings, or environmental damage of the project. And the Ford government has already shown it is unwilling to listen to the answers received during these consultation opportunities. 

In fall 2020, the provincial government heard from 2,200 people in the Greater Golden Horseshoe on what Ontario’s top priorities should be over the next three decades. 

Two thirds of respondents, 66 percent, wanted Ford’s majority PC government to make transit as convenient as driving, and 50 percent said they wanted transportation to be healthy for people and the planet. More than a third of participants (40 percent) also wanted the Province to use existing road and railway infrastructure more efficiently and 35 percent said they wanted it to be easier to travel between work and other places. While the PCs claim they are prioritizing investment in transit, holding up the GTA West Highway and Bradford Bypass as key elements of your efforts to reduce congestion in Ontario only shows how stuck in the past the PC Party is. 

These highway projects will also have the effect of unlocking thousands of acres of land for development, much of it on or near significant greenspace, and owned by developers with close ties to the PC party. 

The PC government is either incapable or unwilling to see that the construction of new highways will not solve Ontario’s transportation problems. They appear to be unwilling to even consider what the billions of dollars set aside for the highway projects could mean if invested into public transit and rail expansion instead. 

Over the past week, political leaders have been meeting in Glasgow for the COP26 climate discussions. Many hope that enhanced targets to combat climate change will result from the meeting of political leaders from across the globe. The conference was also a chance to bring together voices from around the world to discuss new ideas, new ways of doing things, and amplify new voices in the climate discussion, including those of youth and Indigenous peoples. 

“It’s a farce to think we will solve this problem with the same thinking and the same people who created it,” said climate activist Clover Hogan, founder of Force of Nature during a panel discussion at COP26. “We need in these rooms young people who are not willing to abide by the status quo, and we need people in these rooms who the climate crisis is already their lived experience.”

It will be up to voters to decide in June, whether they think the PC Party — which cancelled the province’s cap and trade program, eliminated subsidies for EVs, stripped conservation authorities of their power, violated privileges of Ontarians enshrined in the Environmental Bill of Rights, time and time again attempted to pass legislation to hand favours to developers over protecting the environment, and decimated legislation protecting endangered and threatened species — is capable of taking the climate crisis seriously. 

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @JoeljWittnebel

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